The Healing Power of Onions

Hah, nice topic, huh? I’m still battling this cough I’ve had for more than a month. I’ve tried everything except going to a doctor. Why? Well, it’s because I had crappy insurance with my employer when I was still working – for sick visits, I’d have to pay for the total cost of the visit itself. That means just the examination is going to be at least $200 or so plus whatever tests they decided to add on, knowing my crappy insurance. So I was looking to pay maybe around $500 out of pocket just to go see a doctor who was going to say “Oh, no antibiotic will help you. You just need to rest, drink a lot of fluids and you’ll get better.” Well, easier said than done. So I sucked it up and didn’t go to the doctor. Ha ha. I think I may have had bronchitis. Or still have but I’m definitely at the end of it. I was taking OTC medicines like Robitussin (doesn’t do diddly), Delsym (didn’t work as well as I would have liked), Dayquil (worked the first day and not so much afterwards), Nyquil (doesn’t work as well as I would have liked but at least it knocked me out), all varieties of Mucinex (just turned my cough from a dry cough to a phlegmy one). I even tried some home remedies for cough using lemon, honey, cayenne, etc. Didn’t work. Just the sight of another cough drop would make me gag on the spot so no thank you.

I started out with an extremely dry and itchy cough. Nothing would quell it. It was so bad that the bus driver on my commute actually stopped the bus and handed me a bottle of water to stop my coughing fits. Total embarrassment! After two weeks of the dry cough, I took Mucinex and it turned into a phlegmy and mucus-y cough and I was spitting up boogers all the time. I still am! Then I caught whatever daycare colds my son would get which would include symptoms like runny nose and that transformed into a post-nasal drip that made my coughing even worse! Ugh! This is endless. It’s always like this. I always get sick starting in November and I don’t get well till it starts to get warm again. Gahhh.

My mom is big on reading articles in the newspapers. She read somewhere that if you steam an onion and drink the juices from it, it would help the cough. I didn’t believe her but I humored her when she would chop the onion, put it into a bowl and place it inside an old-school rice cooker where you put water on the outside of the bowl. 2 cups of water on the outside, if anyone is interested. The onion would produce a small amount of juice. Basically after it steamed, she put the chopped onion in a sieve and squished the juice out of the onion and handed it over to me. It’s probably about like 2 oz of liquid, not much. I was dubious at first, drank it and it tasted like sweet onions. It wasn’t so bad.

But I still didn’t think it worked. I stopped seeing her every day because I quit my job to stay at home so there was no one to chop the onion for me anymore but she did leave the rice cooker at my place so I could do it myself. But I was lazy and didn’t do it.

I noticed on the days that I didn’t drink the onion juice, my cough would be so much worse. So I started doing the onion thing every day. Sometimes I get lazy and don’t do it and then I regret it afterwards.

So I chop an onion, like a medium sized one, every day. Today I used 4 really puny onions. I chopped it up and put it in a bowl and steamed it with 2 cups on the outside of the onion bowl in an old school rice cooker. After it gets steamed, it looks like this:

I then take a spoon and squish the hell out of the onions to get that precious juice that seems to work on my chronic cough:

The onions look like this post-squishing:

You can discard the onions after using this or just eat them. I ate them the first time (I threw them in an omelet) and was pretty onion-ed out by the end. So these days I set the cooked onion for my mom and she dumps it into a soup or something and eats them.

I know this sounds like an old wives’ tale but this is the only thing that works for me. I find that I cough a lot less after drinking this. I don’t cough as violently. On the days I don’t make this onion tonic, my cough is much more violent and more often. I’m convinced this is working for me. Try it! You will see!

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Lovely, another storm is hitting us as I type this but this time it’s snow. I really hope I don’t lose power this time. I don’t know what I’m going to do if we lose power and have no way of getting out from underneath all that snow and with two little munchkins! We were supposed to celebrate Lunar New Year this weekend and celebrate my father’s birthday this weekend with hot pot but that’s not happening anymore because of the storm. I just hope it won’t be as bad as they say it will be! 😦

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2013 at 3:35 pm and tagged with bronchitis, cough, health, onions and posted in food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.